Flooding, metaphorical and literal

Okay, I have to admit it.  I'm starting to panic.  I cannot seem to get any work done, and so each day slips by in what would be a moderately pleasant manner except that OH-MY-GOD-I-WILL-NEVER-FINISH-AT-THIS-RATE.

I haven't so completely lost perspective that I think I've done nothing valuable.  However, I mostly seem to be scraping together some scraps of ideas to patch into some kind of whole.  At this point, I don't even care that much, I just want to give up and get it over with.  Unfortunately, there's a lot to do before I can even think about submitting, and I don't see how I'm going to do it.  One thing I've found very useful to remember is that, according to my friends, I've been saying "I didn't do any work this week" nearly every week of the three-and-a-half years I've been here.  Yet evidently things have gotten done somewhere along the way.

It also helps when people like Phil come back and visit for the day, as he did yesterday.  Everyone else can say encouraging things, but he understands The Fear better than most.  This year, most of the people who were my social ties have either left or are drifting away, or else they're in writing-up caves somewhere.  Consequently, I find it hard to get excited about much of anything.  It was really good to regain the old sense of vitality for a day.  And you simply have to listen to your very clever friends when they say you have a compelling argument.

In other news, the river has been incredibly swollen from some recent rain, though I swear there hasn't been enough of it to cause this kind of flooding.  We were already having to wade out in our bare feet or wellies to get the boat out, and over the weekend no one was allowed to row at all.  On Sunday, we had to pick our way to the boathouse from some backstreets, because the water had reached right up to the front of several other boathouses.  Here's what it looked like at ours: a couple feet shy of the staircase.  From the upstairs window, it looked like we were in an ark, but we consoled ourselves that at least we were in a building full of boats if worse came to worst.  Let's hope that's also the case for my metaphorical river of stress, which is also overflowing.  I must have a research scull around here somewhere...